The conception of the everyday self which unfolds in Being and Time may be seen as closer to that found among the ancient Greeks than it is to our own modern picture. For the Greeks, to be human was to be a place-holder in the natural structure of the oikos, or, later, the polis. The most unhappy of all men in the times Homer describes was not the slave, but the free man (thes) who had no place in the world. Even for medieval Christianity, with its concerns about salvation, being human is most often conceived in terms of having a place in the hierarchical structure laid out in the divine plan. It was not until the cataclysmic events associated with the rise of modern science that the sharp modern distinction was drawn between the “persona” and the “true self’ lying behind it.
What Heidegger is suggesting is that, although the modern objectifying concept of the self was an important cultural achievement, it does not provide us with a primordial portrayal of our everyday understanding of ourselves. The inward-turning tendency of introspection and self-reflection, which plays such an important role in modern thought, does not bring about the discovery of the real self so much as it tends to distort and conceal our most primordial everyday self-understanding. The dictum “Know thyself!” should (109) not call for the stripping away of social masks to find a pure “I.” True self-knowledge, on the contrary, is to be attained by looking away from the self-objectifying inwardness of modern thinking in order to recognize the self as a crossing point of cultural systems in the intelligible world.
One’s own Dasein becomes something that it can itself proximally “come across” only when it looks away from its “experiences” and the “center of its actions,” or does not as yet “see” them at all. Dasein finds “itself’ proximally in what it does, uses, expects, avoids—in those things environmentally ready-to-hand with which it is proximally concerned (SZ:119).
When Dasein’s Being is understood as fully delineated by its social competence and expressions, then it is clear that “knowing oneself is grounded in Being-with which understands primordially” (124; my emphasis).
For this reason Heidegger says that “the ‘subject’ of everydayness” is “the Anyone” (114). In the expressions of our social competence in dealing with the world, we handle tools and deal with others as “anyone” does. Since the structuring of roles and the criteria for operating in the world are applicable to anyone whatsoever, I am not in any sense unique in my ordinary ways of Being.
Proximally, it is not “I,” in the sense of my own self, that “am,” but rather the others, whose way is that of the Anyone. In terms of the Anyone and as the Anyone, I am “given” proximally to “myself’ (129).
It follows, then, that my Being in everydayness is “representable” or “delegatable” (vertretbar) (126); because the self is nothing other than an exemplification of forms of life that are essentially public, anyone can fill in for me and take my place.
The source of the structures of significance that make up the world is therefore not the res cogitans or transcendental ego, but the public-in-general.
The Anyone itself prescribes that way of interpreting the world and Being-in-the-world which lies closest. Dasein is for-the-sake-of the Anyone in an everyday manner, and {the Anyone itself articulates the referential context of significance} (129; my emphasis).
The Anyone is also the source of our pre-ontological understanding: “From the kind of Being of the Anyone,” Heidegger writes, (110) “everyday Dasein draws its pre-ontological way of interpreting its Being” (130). As we shall see, even the possibility of “authenticity,” as Heidegger uses this term, is not to be equated with the traditional conception of transcending the social world to be true to a “real” self underlying one’s masks and disguises. On the contrary, authenticity is a “mode” of being the Anyone:
{Authentic Being-one’s-Self} does not rest upon an exceptional condition of the subject, a condition that has been detached from the Anyone; {it is rather an existentiell modification of the Anyone—of the Anyone as an essential existentiale} (130).
The Anyone is an “existentiale,” or essential structure of Dasein, not a condition that can be overcome. To be Dasein is essentially to be a nexus of the socially constituted relations of a culture. Since the Anyone defines Dasein as everyday Being-in-the-world, the structures that make up the formal characterization of Dasein become concrete and have a content only in Dasein’s being the Anyone.
By interpreting Dasein as the Anyone, Heidegger’s phenomenology of everydayness works to counteract the tendency toward the displacement of meaning into subjectivity which began with the rise of modern science. Dilthey had already taken the first steps toward relocating meaning into the world in his attempt to grasp the human life-world as “objective mind.” For Dilthey, the world studied by the human sciences is a world that is already intelligible because it is shot through with meaning. But, to the extent that he still conceives of meaning as a product of something inner which is expressed in the outer world, Dilthey remains ensnared in Cartesian dualism. By regarding the self as nothing other than its meaningful expressions, Heidegger is able to fully break away from the Cartesian tradition. His conception of the intelligible world as a holistic field of meaningfulness undermines both the inclination to see reality as consisting solely of spatiotemporal particulars and the temptation to think of meanings and values as solely subjective. The world is seen as a liber naturae expressing the aims and interests of a culture.